How to setup the structure in Craft for a Property Development site I'm building

Question

I've been designing and building a property developers website for the last 9 months (client delayed building it due to economic reasons), but now we are at the point where it's ready to be built into Craft, as I've finished the HTML/CSS/JS build after the 3 months of hard work.

But due to the client budget I'm attempting to do the Craft build myself (I'm a designer with good CSS etc, but this is my first Craft build), so I'd appreciate a bit of advice on the best approach, as I've tried a number of different approaches so far, but am really struggling, as the development section of the site has multiple levels, and I need to set it up in a way that is going to be idiot proof for the client to be able to add new developments, and all the associated properties with each development.

The Development section structure is as follows:

**All Developments** (listing page per development)

--**County** (for example "Berkshire") - A similar listing page for properties only in Berkshire.

----**Development Overview** - Information about the whole development)

------**Available Properties** - A listing page for all of the individual plots in the development

--------**Plot Page** - individual plot information including floorplans, specifications, images etc

These are all linked via breadcrumbs as well.

There are around 15 developments currently, and some have 50+ plots in them. So there could be hundreds of plot pages.

So the client is going to need to be able to create the Development Overview page in the CMS each time, and all the individual Plot pages per development, and also add the Available Properties page once there are plots, and each development will need to be related to the county they are in, and pulled into the listing page at the top level too.

So would appreciate some experienced advice on the simplest approach that is going to be easy for the client to manage.

And also any other recommended resources for learning as I've already been through all of the mijingo video courses, and still struggling as this developers site is much more complicated than any of the tutorial sites, which only have basic relationships.

One final thought I had, is would this be easier to do with Craft commerce? As the development section is very much like a ecommerce site in structure, but without the need for the payment stuff. Or can standard Craft handle it?

Kind regards

Answer 1

I think I follow where you are going. It sounds like you have a few levels so you will indeed be working with a structure (instead of a channel or single).

I'm not sure what "All Developments" means - is that "show me every single entry in this section"?

There are most likely a handful of ways you could go about doing this, here is one way that I would try.

1.) I would make your "County" a category. Call the group "Counties" and then create each county you need (ex: Berkshire). By creating your counties as categories, you can assign (relate) anything back to it. This will allow you to do things like: Get all properties from Berkshire Country. It will be up to you to decide where this relationship lives though. I would put it on the actual property though, that way you have access to it at any level.

2.) Create a few entry types: 1) Development 2) Property 3) Plot By doing this, we can have a clean authoring experience by having each entry type have it's own fields. Meaning your Properties entry won't have inputs for the images like your Plots entry would. It just keeps things a lot cleaner for the author.

3.) Build out the structure for each Development. This is what that might look like. Let's say you have a section (of type structure) called "Developments"

 - Entry: (Type Development)
     |- Entry: (Type Property) <-- This is where I would assign County
         |- Entry: (Type Plot)

 - Entry: (Type Development)
     |- Entry: (Type Property)
         |- Entry: (Type Plot)

By setting things up this way, now we can easily do things like, "Get all plots from foo property" or, "get all properties from bar development".

Or, another completely different way would be create categories for each County, Development and Property. You would then have a single section called "Plots" (of type channel). Each entry would then have category inputs to relate the plot back to the correct County and property.

The problem with this approach is that it isn't quite as straight forward to create higher-level things like Properties. I've found that having people go back and forth from categories and entires can be confusing.

Hope this helps get you going!